Monday, March 18, 2013

Complaining about documentary films

Indifferent filmmaking shouldn’t be tolerated in any form, but documentaries tend to get a pass, perhaps because the information they provide is considered more valuable than the way they provide it. But accepting documentaries made in tired, cut-and-paste formats only encourages more like them, and even undermines the legitimacy of films that try different things....Scott Tobias, AV Club

As much as I do love documentary films -- my wife and I make an annual pilgrimmage to the University of Missouri for the True/False documentary festival and gorge ourselves -- I share some of Tobias' concerns. Docs tend to be formulaic and sententious, their attempts to persuade insufficiently balanced by contrary views.

I was very intrigued at True/False earlier this month by filmmaker Robert Stone's Pandora's Promise -- a film highlighting the conversion of several prominent environmentalists to the pro nuclear-power side of the energy debate, a conversion that Stone himself had undergone. But he gave very short shrift to the anti-nuke side, to the point that his movie, whatever its merits, felt too much like propaganda for comfort.

When questioned about this omission after the screening, Stone said that the anti-nuke side was well known and he didn't want to turn "Pandora's Promise" into something resembling a cable-TV news channel debate.

But what Stone fails to understand in summed up in Tobias' essay in a quote from director Lucien Castaing-Taylor: “The moment I feel like I’m being told what to think about something, I feel that I want to resist the authority of the documentarian."

Not to say documentaries shouldn't have a point of view and advance it, but to say that the viewer should always be left with the feeling that the documentarian was fair and accurate in considering and presenting other relevant viewpoints.

That said, "Pandora's Promise" stands to be the most important movie about the environment since "An Inconvenient Truth." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman explains why:

This isn’t a movie that preaches to the choir. It’s a movie that says: “Stop thinking what you’ve been thinking, because if you don’t, you’re going to collude in wrecking the world.” Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes....

The film’s incredibly articulate — and deeply progressive — spokemen and women explain the nuts and bolts of why nuclear power, manufactured with the sophisticated breeder reactors that are available today, is fundamentally clean, efficient, and, yes, safe....

The most startling argument mounted by Pandora’s Promise is that the rise of nuclear power is not merely a good thing, but probably inevitable, because it is, in fact, the only way that we can power the planet and save it at the same time. In what has to be the ultimate liberal-documentary irony, Stone demonstrates that the dire threat of global warming all but demands nuclear power as the key to its solution. Without it, the debate will go on, but carbon dioxide will continue to fill the atmosphere, and liberals everywhere, caught up in reflexive modes of environmental “activism” that are now not just complacent but perilously out-of-date, will continue to let their anxieties trump reality.

Posted at 12:13:10 PM

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I'm sure that Mr. Tobias has the same feeling about films by Michael Moore.

ZORN REPLY -- I don't understand this gripe. Did you read the Tobias essay? It's about a hunger documentary, that, to read his summary, blames American's food problems on Reagan. I'm the one who had the problem with the pro-nuke film, and not because I feel particularly strongly about that issue. Remember, my father was an atomic physicist at the University of Michigan and I have an affinity for the scientific method -- to wit, I'm open to proof of just about anything but very, very skeptical about that which must be taken on faith.

The inconvenient truth is that there is no practical energy source that does not produce CO2 other than nuclear. The left was always anti-nuclear but, when they became obsessed with CO2, nuclear power suddenly became OK.

My initial reaction was the same as Jimmy G's first sentence. It may still be right but I am not familiar enough with the current prospects for wind and solar to know whether that argument still holds. It may.

The trouble with wind and solar is that there is so much embodied energy (the energy used to produce the devices) in the physical plant. Where does that energy come from? Either nukes, or sources that produce CO2.

I haven't seen the film yet, but perhaps the biggest issue with wind and solar is that it is not 24/7. You can try storing it up, but that requires huge battery banks and batteries eventually need to be disposed of, all acid, not exactly environmentally friendly.

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb, being very concerned with our underestimation of and fragility to huge disasters, be that climate change, industrial accidents or whatnot, proposes broad diversification of energy sources rather than a disproportionate commitment to other or the other. This argument is based on the power law connection between harmful things and harm: twice as much of fossil fuel byproducts in the atmosphere is not twice but perhaps 4, 8 or maybe 16 times as harmful, twice as many nuclear power plants in one earth-plate zone is way more than twice as much damage to the environment should an earthquake strike; twice as many batteries to store solar or wind generated electricity ...you probably get the picture. So it's simple math: all power generated by one source will produce X to the power of Y harm. Spread it evenly between say 4 sources and you have 4 time ((X/4) to the power of Y) harm, which is 1 over (4 to the power of Y-1) smaller, that is hugely smaller harm potential to the environment overall.

Taleb uses France as an example of what not to do, and his argument is not about nuclear or not, but about lack of diversification and thus increased fragility to misestimation. He says after the Japanese accident, France had to commit to a huge unanticipated expenditure to shore up nuclear plant safety. Had they been using nuclear for only 1/4 of their power (as opposed to more 3 times that), the expenditure would have been, using the harm = harmful input raised to a power math, way less than 1/3.

I haven't seen the doc, but where I think the government has gone wrong in regulating nuclear safety is simple: The penalties for the companies that own nuclear plants & the people who run the companies are far too lenient.

As far is publicly known, the US Navy which operates the most nuclear plants of anyone has had only one serious accident with a reactor in a ship.
The reason is simple, screw it up on a nuclear powered ship, you die!
So, if a private nuke plant has a serious problem of the Three Mile Island, Brown's Ferry or Fukashima type, execute the entire board of directors, all the top management & the actual employees on duty at the plant of the private utility.
I guarantee you, that will be the last nuclear incident that this country will ever see!

Just to set the record straight on "A Place at the Table" the doc on hunger in America here is a fuller quote from Tobias on it "....as a piece of agitprop, it’s awfully thin gruel, a graceless info-dump bracketed by interviews with activists and a handful of personal stories from suffering families around the country. It makes a persuasive argument—which it makes easier by not allowing any counterargument—but it’s unpersuasive as a piece of filmmaking. In laying out its case, it’s manipulative and dull by turns."

As with everything today you either have to some knowledge about the subject or the curiosity to double check sources to make sure you are not being duped.

Could someone please get Boris a TI-84?? The man's trying to express equations here!

My all-time favorite documentary is "The Day After Trinity," about the Manhattan Project. The director hardly needed to make any effort at balance, because his subjects (scientists and others involved in the project) provided it in the course of their interviews. They knew what they were building, they knew how it would likely be used, they knew the human toll it would likely take... but they felt it was their duty to continue their work, in facing an even greater evil. A remarkable document of some of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century.

David P. Graf,
"My wife and I would like to just be able to see some of the documentaries."

For us, this is one of the better things about Netflix. They have lots of good documentaries available, whether by DVD or streaming online. And it's a nice coincidence that, while there are certain movie spectacles that we feel really deserve to be seen on a big screen in a theater, there aren't many documentaries that fall into that category, so we don't mind watching them on TV. (Not that this is doing the documentary filmmakers any favors, I realize.)

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